I was thinking about when websites didn't need their own domains, and instead we joined neighbourhoods, and had curated directories which were more useful than searching.

Then I followed a rabbit hole and discovered NeoCities.

Aware of Neocities! A friend uses it for his website.

Also, what I suggested is pretty much how name resolution worked on the early internet. And this woman was responsible for maintaining the hosts file.

Also there are still tilde servers. Where you get a home directory and can serve pages from ~/username/ like back in the olden days.

There might be a bandwidth issue because everything is super lofi. Only use case I can come up with is under the radar stuff.

I'll allow it has a certain janky charm.